The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 319: Michael Easter—Hunger is the Best Sauce

Episode Date: May 16, 2023

The professor, adventurer, and author of the The Comfort Crisis speaks about his 33-day trip off the grid in the arctic tundra and how he learned to embrace silence, boredom, and uncomfortableness.   The Comfort Crisis https://eastermichael.com/book/  

Hello, friends. It's the way I heard at episode number 319. This one's called Hunger is the best sauce. Chuck, would you agree? Because I know you're a fan of many sauces and have experimented with many gravies over the years on all forms of pasta. Do you think hunger could somehow be the best sauce? Yeah, I believe if you're hungry enough, it doesn't matter what the sauce is. You don't need no sauce at all. It reminds me that line from Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.

This steak is so good it don't need no ketchup. Well, this interview is so good that you might just want to skip ahead right now and get into it, although don't. Because if you do that, you won't know what you're getting into. My guest is Michael Easter. He's a terrific writer, been writing for men's health for a long time and some of the other outdoor magazines. I met him last week. I met him virtually at an event that Dave Ramsey and I co-hosted called America's Lerner, labor crisis. And the point of the event was to try and talk candidly about the reasons why we've

got, you know, nearly seven and a half million able-bodied men sitting out of the workforce and why it's so difficult to hire these days. And, you know, he had some ideas to help entrepreneurs and small business people. And of course, you know, I'm doing the micro-works thing. But he invited some other people onto the stage to talk about the underlying issues of this problem. And one of those guys is Michael Easter, who has written a terrific book called The Comfort Crisis. Let me just read one sentence. This is the one that caught my eye. In many ways, we're more comfortable than ever before.

But could our sheltered, temperature-controlled, overfed, under-challenged lives, actually be the leading cause of many of our most urgent, physical, and mental health issues? I'm going to go with yes. Hell yeah. You'll get halfway through the book and realize the answer, of course, is yes. It's a great read, and it works on a couple of different levels. First, it's just a great story about a guy who has never been hunting before, who agrees to get onto a series of increasingly smaller and smaller planes

with a modern-day Jeremiah Johnson named Donnie Vincent and get dropped off in the middle of nowhere, deep in the Arctic Circle, where they spend 33 days hunting for Caribou. What he learns along the way are a series of really personal lessons about his relationship with comfort overall, but specifically with silence and with boredom and with nutrition and with exercise and with fitness. And really, it's a big giant parapetia, wherein he learns that everything he thought he knew

about some of these basic things was wrong. And so he has this thesis that the key to living a more connected and ultimately fulfilling life is to be less comfortable and make affirmative decisions that make us less comfortable. But it's not just anecdotal. He's a journalist and a bit of a scientist and a lecturer and a professor over at the University of Las Vegas. And an author. And an author.

And so everything is backed up with a lot of scientific evidence and a lot of proof. And it's just a really thoughtful rumination that is probably going to change the way you think about what you eat, how you exercise, and pretty much everything else. But he's on the podcast because we met virtually at this event. And I immediately picked up his book and I read it in two sittings. and unlike some people who listened to the blinkest version to prepare like 20 minutes ago, Chuck. Yeah. I thought we weren't going to name names, Mike. I'm sorry, are you uncomfortable? Have I made you uncomfortable?

Yeah, yeah. I feel like of the two of us, I'm embracing his thesis more than the other. Could be. It's a great conversation. He's a terrific writer, and I do think he's got a lot to say about everything that ails us. The book is The Comfort Crisis. My guest is Michael Easter. You'll hear from him directly right after this. Do do, do, do, do do do do, do, do, do, do... Well, are you sick of it yet? Are you sick of AI hogging up all the headlines and sucking up all the bandwidth?

You find yourself wishing we lived in a simpler time? Do you miss the rotary phone? Well, get over it. The genie is out of the bottle. The poop is out of the goose, I'm afraid. AI is here to stay. And every business in the country is asking themselves the same question. How do we make it work for us? Well, the answer to that question varies, but you'll find it in a free guide that you can get right now at netsuite.com slash Mike. It's called demystifying AI. It's totally free. It's essential reading for anybody trying to make sense of a future that appears to have arrived yesterday.

NetSuite, of course, is the number one AI enterprise resource planning software out there, trusted by over 43,000 businesses. With NetSuite, you can use the AI of your choice, GROC or Claude or Chat, GAPT, whatever else is out there, to connect to your actual business data, all of it, and automate all of those tiresome, time-sucking, soul-deaddening manual processes. This is AI built into the system. that's currently running your business. Learn more at netsuite.com slash Mike.

And while you're there, pick up their free business guy, demystifying AI. It's filled with super useful information. And again, it's free at netsuite.com slash mike. That's netsuite.com. Netsweet. Slash Mike. First things first, Michael. Where are you?

I'm in Las Vegas, Nevada. And perhaps. most importantly, are you comfortable? A little too comfortable right now. I had a nice little rolly seat, you know, topped in leather, it's cushiony. This is very off-brand for me. I should be like squatting, just holding a squat for the next hour and a half or something. Or sitting on a stool of nails.

Yes. Now, see, that's too far, Chuck. But a stool, like just sitting on a stool would force you to engage your core. It would force you to incorporate some semblance of balance. It would prohibit you from leaning back into anything that could be confused with a recumbent posture. It, in fact, is a fairly physical thing to do, like when you think about it, as opposed to the lazy boy Barka Loungeer. Yes, exactly. There's actually a researcher I talked to.

I think he's in the book. His name's Daniel Lieberman. He's at Harvard. He's an anthropologist. And he talks about how one of the reasons that we have so much back pain in the U.S. is because we have back rests on every single chair. In a lot of developing countries, people don't have hip problems and they don't have back problems.

And that's because their resting posture is often in, they can just pop down into a squat. They'll sit on the ground, you know, with their legs crossed, but they're keeping their torso up, holding it upright. And that's activating a low level of muscle over time that strengthens your back. So our problem is that our back muscles atrophy because we never have to use them to sit upright.

And then we go and lift something and it's like we got nothing to work with. and it goes right to our spines. So your book is really an homage to unintended consequences. And the thing I really enjoyed about it a lot. And if I haven't said it out loud, let me say yes. I read the whole thing cover to cover. I just finished it, which is a treat because I never get to talk to people, you know,

moments after I finish their book. It's usually like a year or five later. But I'm sharp, man. Yeah, Lieberman was in your book. I remember him vividly. He made that very point. The thing I loved, the biggest thing that I loved is actually the smallest thing. And it's exactly what we just came out of the gate with.

It's these tiny little things that used to define us as a species, but we've slowly arbitraged the difficulty out of everyday life. And like a frog in the boiling water, we've just become the batteries in the Matrix, you know? I mean, even just taking a crap for crying out loud. I mean, I'll never forget the first time in the Boy Scout. where I had to wander out in the woods and drop a deuce and just the humiliation of pooping up your own pants a little bit and falling over and just not being used to using all of the muscles that you have to use to do the most basic things. Isn't your book really that times a thousand different things in a thousand different ways? Yes, we are like the fish who don't know they're in water, basically.

our environments have changed so much from what they used to be like in the past, and it has in turn changed us so much, but you don't know what you don't know. Someone the other day asked me, they said, did you have to pitch the book before you went and spent a month in the Arctic? And I said, yeah. And so I told them, you know, in the pitch, like I knew that I would be physically working, you know, a lot more.

I knew that I was going to be cold. I knew that I was going to be hungry. But there are so many things that I encountered up there that I just had no idea because you don't know what you don't know. For example, silence, I had no idea how silent it would be up there. I mean, hauntingly silent, creepily silent at first. But then all of a sudden, you start to just, ah, you start to come down and calm down. I love the way in the book, the trip you took really is your permission slip to weigh in on a great many things

and bring in other experts who really have a lot to say about all these individual trials and tribulations that you experience. And when I was reading your description of like the plane leaves, you've taken five plane rides to get to truly the middle of nowhere. You're deep in the Arctic Circle. The last plane, which basically you described about the size of a sofa, maybe. drops you off, it leaves, and you are standing there in this profound quietude. And as I was reading and I thought, man, it reminds me of the quiet room I went into down in Palo Alto. I hope he says something about that because that's a hell of a place. And sure enough, you do.

And explain to people what it means really to be alone with nothing but the sound of silence. It's exceedingly uncomfortable at first. What I think is interesting to back up is that today when we go, I need some alone time. I'm going to be alone. We might go sit with ourselves in a room, but we might watch TV. So we're with other people through the TV. We might listen to music. So we're with other people through music.

We might be texting people. We never have these extended alone times where it's just us. Not to mention, when I was up there, there, there's not a person within miles and miles and miles and miles. I mean, humans are as densely packed into spaces as they ever have before. And this is very different than we lived in the past. And so for me, standing up there and going, one, I can't even reach out to a person in the form of media right now

or send a text or anything like that. But number two, there is no one around here for miles. Like, no one's coming to get me for the next, however long it is, four or five, six hours in the plane. And by the way, could get delayed because the storms come in all the time. It was definitely a little unnerving, but at the same time also a little freeing because all of a sudden when you're out of society, you start to go, wow, you kind of shape yourself to society. That's what we do. We're social creatures.

And when society gets removed from the equation, you go, wow, I could be anything right now. And that's a little bit strange. We just don't realize the incredible cacophony that surrounds us, all of the time. And until you start to really eliminate that, I remember in that quiet room, I couldn't identify it at first. It was the sound of my own heart, the sound of blood in my ears.

Like, you can almost start to hear the sound of your blood circulating. And it is deeply off-putting. Deeply off-putting is a great, great phrase for it. I had one time where I walked out and I could hear this, and I'm going, is that like, what is that?

You know, I'm thinking something's sneaking up on me and this is the end. And it was my wristwatch. Wow. Wow. Yeah. It's just so silent out there that you pick that up, so loudly.

How long did you spend in the quiet room? Maybe 10 minutes. Maybe 10. It was long enough because what I found is that one of the first things, you know, ironically, you talk about the sound of your wristwatch. The first thing you lose is your sense of time and your sense of everything. It's like looking at the world through the bottom of a Coke bottle. Something is distorted. Something's just not what you're used to.

And then, forgive me, I know we're kind of starting in the middle of things, but this juxtaposition of silence with boredom, I asked you about it on stage the other night. That's also a big, big deal. this idea of never being uncomfortable sits next to this idea of never being bored. And somewhere in between there is just the quiet that used to come as a matter of course, but we just can't get it anymore. Can you make that make sense like boredom and quiet and how that's screwing us up today? I'll try and pull off both those threads. So first of all, well, I'll start with quiet since we were just talking about that.

Basically, humans have increased the world's loudness fourfold. Fourfold. We live in noise now. We live in a lot of noise. Now, if you think about the context of noise in the past, the noises that we used to hear tended to be natural. It would be like wind. It would be birds. It would be water.

And today, we have a lot of noises that are created by machines and they're much louder. And in the past, any time we heard a loud noise, it was usually a bad sign. it's a tiger coming to get you it is a rock slide that's going to bury you it's a storm coming in that's going to put you in a bad position so we evolved to basically associate loud noises with danger you still see this today if someone's sitting there and you walk up behind them and you snack your hands together we jump right well living in this sort of trickle of loudness has sort of led to a low level of stress, sort of stress hormones being released at a low level all the time. So when you look at people who live near very loud roads, they tend to have significantly high. I think it's like the

depression and anxiety rate is maybe 25, 30 percent higher among those people. And this is even controlled for in nice neighborhoods. This isn't that, you know, people who, you know, don't have enough money live near the road or whatever it is. So it's controlled for in nice neighborhoods. So basically, the long story short is that by living in all the noise we do now it tends to stress us out and lead to some bad outcomes meanwhile when you put people in more silent environments they find it uncomfortable at first because we've almost sort of adapted to how loud the world is now but after enough time in it they start to calm down they start to calm down they even start to be more productive at work they don't even realize that they're that much more productive but when you compare their work to when they were working in space that were much louder to when they were in spaces that were much quieter. They get more work done and the work is judged to be higher quality. So it's this kind of like low-level thing that you just don't even realize because, again, it's like you're fishing water, right? You don't realize you're in the water.

Interesting. I talked to a guy a couple weeks ago who works in the cochlear implant world and they've had some huge breakthroughs. And one of the things that's really fascinating is what happens to a person who's been profoundly deaf their entire life, and all of a sudden they hear sound for the first time. It's actually terrifying. And it's difficult to imagine, but I think you can, you know, if you've been in a quiet room or just really, if you just ponder it, I mean, it makes no sense at all.

You can't describe sound to a deaf person any more than you could describe blue or red to a blind person. So, yeah, we were much closer, though. to the default position of profound silence once upon a time, I guess, than we are today. Yeah, yeah, I think we evolved in environments that were much more silence. So that's kind of where we tend to sit past. Obviously, you know, I don't want anyone to walk away with the message from this book that I think progress is bad. I think we live in an amazing time right now.

We're all over 35 on this podcast in this conversation right now. Just barely. Most people didn't make it past 35. Most people actually didn't make it past five in many countries in the past. But I do think that there are some side effects, which you kind of mentioned when we started the podcast. And so it's like, how do we account for those? The good news is is that, you know, people back then, they couldn't change things. They kind of had to wait for things to progress.

Well, now we're in this amazing time period, but it's how do we take some of the lessons of the things that used to benefit us in the past and insert them into our lives today. Got it. Okay. And rather than take a deep dive now on the importance of boredom, let me just go back a little bit so people really understand how far you put yourself out of your own comfort zone. You know, where exactly were you on the planet? How long did you stay there? And, you know, not to be too ridiculously broad, but, you know, why the hell did you do it? So we were in a place called I was with me and two other guys. We were in a place called the Baird Mountain Range. We were maybe 100, 150 miles from Cotsabu, Alaska. You have to fly in there.

You land on the nearest, you know, you just land in the middle of the tundra. There's nothing out there. And we were there for 33 days. And why I went out there is that just through my work, I'm a health journalist. I've written about health and what makes humans happy and fine meaning. my entire career and I'd basically notice that the things that tend to improve our life, you often have to go through discomfort to get them. So if you want to improve your health through exercise, which is the best way to improve your health, you're going to have to exercise

and that's going to be uncomfortable. But on the other side of that, you get a benefit. If you want to lose weight, that might be good for you, but you're going to be hungry. That's going to be uncomfortable, but you'll get a benefit. If you want to improve your mental health, You probably have to have some hard conversations with people. You might have to ask yourself some hard questions, but by going through that, your life improves. I think that's the story of improving our lives in the context of today is that you often have to go through short-term discomfort

to get a long-term benefit. The things that most hurt us, the script is flipped. It's usually selecting short-term comfort, and then that, in turn, makes your life worse over time. So junk food, not exercising, sitting on the couch, more cell phone time, right? That's like very easy to do, but it often doesn't benefit us in the long run if we overdo it. Did you find yourself becoming increasingly or feeling disconnected from something primal?

Like was something missing in your life that sent you on this level of immersed journalism? Yeah, I think so. So I got sober when I was 28. and that really like drilled in this idea that if you want to improve or change yourself, it's not going to be easy. Like it's just not. But by going through that, and it was hell, it was not a fun time. But my life improved across the board.

I mean, full stop. Everything you could measure, everything you could not measure, just got better. And from there, it was kind of a search for, okay, you know, you're kind of on this meaning. now. It's like, well, not dead yet, got a whole new life ahead of me. What am I going to do with it? And I wanted to learn. I wanted to learn about, you know, what would not only help me and make me a better person, but because I'm a communicator, ultimately, I wanted to see what I could learn along the way and communicate to others. And I was working at a magazine called Men's Health, and I met a guy whose name is Donnie Vincent through my work there. I did a profile on him,

and he's this backcountry bow hunter and filmmaker, travels in to the world's most remote dangerous areas. And he makes these movies that are, they're shot and they look like planet Earth, but they have hunting in them. So he has this very unique perspective on the world, on hunting. He's just a very far out, intelligent, wise, humble character. And after doing the story on him for men's health,

we just hit it off, we became friends. And he called me up one day. And he goes, he's got this Minnesota accent. He's like, Michael, I'm going up to the Arctic for more than a month. You want to come along? And, you know, my initial thought is not only no, but like, hell no. Hell no. But he starts in on this sales pitch. And it's like, it's going to be the most epic thing a human being could ever do. We're going to see Grizzlies. We're going to cross ancient mountains and forward glacial rivers. And it is going to change you forever. And, you know, it's a sales pitch. And

I kind of thought back to that observation I'd made about the benefits of discomfort. And so I said, all right, well, that could be a pretty good way to test my theory rather epically. And so I signed on. And, yeah, hung up the phone, told them yes, bought a bunch of gear because that way I was like in it. Because if I decided I was going to bail, my wife would point to those $400 boots and be like, do you keep the receipt, genius? You're going up to the Arctic. You're using those boots.

Well, people are still raving, raving, I tell you, about my mother's performance in the latest Pure Talk commercial. And if you haven't seen it, I encourage you to give it a look on my Facebook page and read the comments. They're hysterical. In this commercial, you'll not only see Peggy Rowe gently criticizing her oldest son for his longstanding

and well-established commitment issues, you'll learn about the latest offer from Pure Talk, which includes unlimited talk text and data for just $3499 a month with no contracts and no commitments of any kind. You can see why I love these guys. If, on the other hand, you have better things to do with your time than watch my mom and me be impossibly charming together, then allow me to remind you here, without all the cleverness and charm, that unlimited talk, text and data on a blazing fast network for just $3499 a month really is an unmitigated bargain. from an American wireless company

that keeps all their customer service in this country, supports our veterans in a meaningful way, as well as the MicroWorks Foundation, and allows me to exploit my own mother in a national advertising campaign. Do what my mom did. Get yourself unlimited high-speed data

for just $3499 a month. At puretalk.com slash row. You can switch in as little as 10 minutes at puretalk.com slash row. Pure talk. So had you formed your theory that, you know, wherever there is comfort, there is pain and that we're going to have to pass through some kind of crucible at this point. I know in your book you talk about, I think it's masagi.

Yeah, Masogi. Masogi, yeah. Explain what that is because I feel like there are corollaries and lots of different cultures and, you know, rites of passage and things like this. It's kind of interesting from the Japanese perspective. Yeah, so Masogi is this ancient Japanese myth that is effectively a hero's journey. Follows this guy whose name is Izunagi and what ends up happening. You know, his life is perfect at the start, which is what happens in every story.

Things are perfect. And then his wife dies. And so this guy, he goes down into the underworld, which is where all, he's a Shinto God. So that's where all Shinto gods go after they die. and he goes to rescue his wife. He's not able to do it because she's died, but he has to make this epic hero's journey up through the caverns of hell.

And along the way, he has all these times where he thinks he's done. He's like going to be done down there. He's reached his edge. But he keeps putting one foot in front of the other. And by continuously doing that, he breaks out of this cavern of hell, and it changes him forever.

He's learned all these things about himself, right? He realizes that, oh, I sold myself short down. there. Like, I'm far more capable than I realized. And this changes his behavior for the rest of his life. So as part of this reporting for this book, I end up meeting this guy whose name is Marcus Elliott. And Marcus, he's a very smart but far out dude. So he went to Harvard Medical School. He decides, I don't want to be a doctor. I want to revolutionize sports science, which, you know, when someone says that, you kind of go, okay, dude, like, whatever. But he actually ends up doing it.

So he's one of the first people who has basically put science and data behind movement quality. And it's like he's got this whole system where he can monitor human movement and put AI behind it to basically tell professional athletes, here are your chances of getting injured next season. Here's like this skill that you're really good at. So you should develop on and on and on and out. Long story short, you just need to know that he's one of the only people that has an official contract. with the NBA, with the NFL, with all these leagues. But the important thing about him is that, yes, he's all about numbers and data and figure, but he also realizes that what really changes his players the most

and the players that really have the gear, it can't always be measured. Right? There's people on teams and people we've encountered in life where if it's the end of the game or a tight situation, a clutch situation, you always always, give them the ball because they've got something else on board. It's like, well, what the hell is that? So to try and get to that, he does this thing he calls Masogi, and it is a sort of tip of the hat to that Japanese story. Once a year, he does something extremely challenging in nature, a big epic physical nature task, and he'll do this with some of the professional athletes he works with, but also, you know,

like the accountant down the street, the artist he's friends with. And these people will go out. They'll pick this crazy task. Like one year they did a, they carried an 85 pound boulder five miles underneath the Santa Barbara Channel. So one person will go down, drop this. Dive, pick up, walk, drop it, go up for air, on and on. But they've also done a little more straightforward ones, still equally hard where it's like, you know, you pick a mountain in the distance. as far as you can see, you try and get there in a day.

Now, the rules are it has to be really hard. Wow. So it must be really hard. And now they define that really hard by saying you should have a 50-50 shot at finishing whatever the task is. True 50-50 shot. Because in modern life, a lot of the times, whenever we take on challenges today, we usually know we're going to finish them.

Right? You're like, this will be hard, but I'm going to finish. Think about a marathon. Sure. You know, it's like, I want to finish. People don't say, I don't know if I'm going to finish. They say, I don't know if I'm going to finish in four hours. Well, no one that I know of has ever run a 26-mile marathon for the first time in, right?

I mean, you train to it, then you train past it. And it's not like, okay, this is the big day. The cameras are rolling. Let's see if I can do it. It's not that. It's just, let's see how fast I can do it. Exactly. Exactly.

And then the second rule is don't die. And that is a sort of tongue-in-cheek way of saying, you know, please be safe and whatever you do. The whole point of this thing is that if you have selected the difficulty level appropriately at that 50-50 shot, you were going to hit that point like the character in that Masogi tale did where you think, I'm done. I can't go any further. I've reached my edge.

But if you keep putting one foot in front of the other, you get another moment. and that's where you look back and you go, well, wait a minute, I thought my edge was back there. But I'm clearly past it. So I've sold myself short here. And then the next question is, where else in my life am I selling myself short? Okay. I get it. Joseph Campbell, the hero's journey, do the hard thing.

I mean, so far, this is a lot of Horatio Alger and just the willingness to challenge yourself. and it's not a new idea. But the book feels like super relevant, I guess, because more and more people are out of touch with that. But it's confusing. Two rules. You have to push yourself to a place where you think there's a 50% chance that you might fail,

which means, you know, difficulty and risk. Like you can't arbitrage the risk out of the Mussogee, so you're diving down 20 feet. you're carrying a boulder, you know, you've got this second rule, which is don't die, but if there's not the possibility of death, then rule one all of a sudden feels kind of squishy. So that's interesting. But the real hero's journey, like you're talking about vision quests and like the stuff the Messiah do and these rites of passage.

It just seems like a lot of people who go through those rights of passage, violate rule number two, what with all the death? Yeah, some definitely do. So I think the larger point that I'm trying to get at by highlighting the Masogi idea in the book is, you know, because when I heard about it, it was like, okay, it's like mildly interesting. It's kind of cool.

But then when you sort of dig and peel back the layers, it's like, oh, this is actually a thing, a version of a thing that humans have been doing for thousands and thousands of years. And the idea of the right of passage is that you're at point A in your life. We need to get you to point B, this place where you're more confident, more competent, better able to contribute to everyone around you.

We don't just hand the keys over. You have to learn that you have these layers within yourself that move you on to being that person that we need you to be. And most of those tended to be something similar, where it's go out and hunt a specific animal, go out into the wilderness for X amount of days, go walking through the desert, Same deal. You're going to hit what you think is your edge. And when you go past it, that teaches you something about yourself that we want you to have.

Isn't it funny? Really? I mean, every culture, every society, most great literature. I mean, Jesus wanders in the desert for what? 40 days. All right. So some guy named Donnie Vincent, who lives off the fat of the land and, you know, kind of off the grid. And he's got a partner, William.

William. Right? Yes, William Altman, the great William Altman. So William Altman is basically the cameraman who follows Donnie Vincent all over the planet, capturing incredible footage of what it looks like to be totally reconnected with the way things used to be. You accept his invitation as a kind of Masogi, perhaps, for yourself. And he says, like, does he know it's going to be 30? days up there in the Arctic or is he like how do you know it's going to be 33 when you don't know

where your next meal is going to come from or if you're even going to get a kill? Yeah, you don't. And, you know, storms can leave you stranded for a long time up there because the planes are these little, you know, as you said, it's like the size of a sofa. And if there's a blizzard, you can be stranded. They've gotten stranded for five days once without much food. Can I just ask about the logistics of it? Yeah.

The idea that you're dropped off. So you and this guy, Daniel, are dropped off somewhere. It's just the two of you? Donnie. Donnie, Vincent. Me, Donnie, and William. So there's three of us. There's three of you.

Okay. So the three of you are dropped off somewhere. And then it's like, okay, I'll be back. The guy who's dropping you off in the plane says, I'll be back in 31 days or whatever. Is that it? And essentially meet here? We have a GPS emergency communicator that if things go south. I mean, Donnie can send him a, you know, those little.

little Garmin thing. So he can send them a message that's like, hey, come get us. Here's our location. You know, so there's safety nets for sure. All right, good. Good. I think that's correct. Because you don't want to die. But it's sporty, right. You don't want to violate rule number two. You don't want to die. But you can't just say, oh, look, we're in the tundra. Come get us. The tundra is, I spent a week there, nothing like this. We were filming a TV show and in relative terms living high off the hog. But I remember trying to walk across the tundra. I don't know how a plane could land on it.

It's like these basketball-shaped round orbs in squishy muck flanked by really hard, brittle shale. Like, I mean, it's very difficult to walk on, much less run. much less land on, I would think. Yeah, there's only so many, the pilots up there have mapped out a lot of spots. So had we needed to get picked up, they would have said, okay,

you're closest to X spot hike there. Yeah, and it usually tends to be on these hills, and they have the planes up there, they have what are called tundra tires, which are these giant rubber tires that are just, they're very low. They don't inflate them much,

so that when it hits the ground, it's just kind of this boom, boom. bum, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, you know, they can just sort of roll over all the crap on the tundra. What did that feel like? Getting in a plane, so like you leave Vegas, you get up to Seattle, I guess, then you're off to Anchorage or wherever you go. And like, the planes get increasingly smaller. I remember a plane out of New Orleans I flew on down to cut off Louisiana. The plane itself had a parachute on it, which was a first for me.

And I just, I can still hear the sound of my sphincter slamming shut as the guy claims. close the door behind me. He's not in the plane with William and Donnie. When you get that far down the food chain, there's like room for the pilot and you're just jammed in behind him like a duffel bag. Oh, yeah. You're like a bobb-blood team. He's like sitting between your legs, you know, and you're like hanging on.

Yeah. The other fascinating fun fact about those planes is they're wrapped in, I'm going to forget the technical name. but it's basically an upscale duct tape. So they get a frame and they wrap it in this like, fibery, plasticy stuff. So you can go touch the plane and it gives, you know, it's a fabric.

So that's unnerving. So the plane ride, and I'll tell you this is that, like, I'm a statistics guy. I'm gonna do the research. So I sign on to this trip and I'm like, okay, this is, you know, this is gonna be risky. We're gonna do everything we can to mitigate the risk. I'm looking at, you know, what's most risky?

Like, oh, I think, the plane ride is actually the riskiest. Like, it definitely is. If you look at the statistics, it's like, okay. So then when I'm standing on the runway, it's just like, oh, man. So the next hour is the time that I'm most likely to die in the next 33 days with these, you know, these crazy pilots who are just very high for risk, you know. But what was interesting, though, and I don't know, I would be interested to hear if you felt

this way in Louisiana is that when you're sitting in the plane, with the pilot like that, even though it's objectively riskier. You don't feel as nervous as you do on a large commercial jet that hits turbulence because I can see how the pilot's reacting. Right. So the- 100%. The plane might be going up and down, but then I look at him and he's like swiping through Instagram,

driving with one hand. It's like, oh, we must be fun. No, it's a wizard of Oz moment. when the man behind the curtain is revealed, everything about the scene sort of makes a different amount of sense. You might not be pleased with the illusion, but at least you're looking at something that, okay, that makes sense. On the plane, that cockpit door is closed, and you're sitting back there strapped in, just reading the fine print on the back of your ticket, which basically says, look, that's where you get the truth, Michael. You know, the flight attendants will come out and say, your safety is our number one priority. You know, here at United, nothing is more important than blah, blah, blah.

On the back of that ticket, it's like, hey, we're going to defy the laws of gravity. You're going to strap yourself into an aluminum tube approaching speeds at 600 miles an hour. Anything could happen. Good luck. So if you want the truth of air travel, yeah, read the back of your carriage ticket or sit in the cockpit. And I agree totally. It's much more comforting to be next to the person who's got his hands on the wheel. I hadn't thought about it in those terms.

But it doesn't last long because once he lands, you get out and now you're totally alone and he leaves. And Donnie and William aren't there yet, which brings us back to the sound of silence and your first brush with boredom. Yeah. So the boredom thing was fascinating because obviously I don't have cell service up there. I'm not bringing books, I'm not bringing magazines, I'm not bringing TVs, and especially because we were hunting this whole time, you're sitting on hills waiting for animals to come through, and they weren't coming through. So you just sit there, and you're bored out of your mind. Like, I haven't been that bored ever. So we read the labels on our food, the energy labels, right? We're like, oh, wow,

Cliff Bar, created by a guy named Gary, named it after his father, Cliff. 250 calories. Interesting. Yeah. Then you read the labels on your gear tags. Like, oh, this jacket's coated in Dermazac. Sounds like acne medication. Actually repels the rain.

You know, it's just. But what's interesting, though, is that your mind also goes to some very interesting places. So, yes, sometimes you're going into some stupid places. other times you think on some wavelengths that you haven't really been in before. So for me, I took a ton of notes. And the notes are pretty interesting. And a lot of them made it into the book. I wrote some of the book.

I came up with ideas for the magazines that I write for. I did all kinds of stuff that was different than I would have done where I board at home. Because if I'm bored at home, I have 75 different screens within a, you know, 20-foot radius to kill my boredom. So boredom is interesting because you can think about as this evolutionary discomfort that basically told us whatever you're doing with your time right now, the return on your time invested has worn thin. So go do something else. So if we're hunting and it's a million years ago, no animals are coming through, but we need food or else we're going to starve, boredom kicks on and goes, go do something else. And in the past, that something else was often productive. We'd go pick potatoes.

We'd go pick berries. We'd maybe go build the shelter. We'd do something, right, that was productive. Sure. And we'd get the low-hanging fruit, too. Like the berry example is good. You can spend an hour picking every berry off of a bush, or you can spend 10 minutes getting the low-hanging berries

and then realize, you know what? I got to get the berries back to the cave. The family's hungry. I need as many berries as I can get. You know, so the boredom of chasing the hard-to-get berries propels you to the next bush where the easy-to-get berries are low-hanging, right? And so you return to the cave with a lot more berries than you would otherwise have. But nowadays, the berries are already in the cave along with a game and everything else and a football game.

and, you know. Yes. Everyone is now drinking berry-flavored soda. Nowadays, though, when we feel that discomfort of boredom, that used to kind of be this thing that was, you know, go do something else. Our options were limited, usually limited to things that would enhance our lives.

We can dive into a screen or, you know, turn on the TV again. And there's nothing inherently wrong with that. But when you look at how much time people spend engaged with digital media, which is 12 and a half hours about on average, from all our different devices. Per day? Per day.

There's a good case to be made that maybe sometimes we should see where boredom takes us. Bortem isn't inherently good or bad. It tells us go do something else. We now default to the easy stimulating thing of digital media now. You teach over at the college in Vegas, is it? Yeah, UNLV. And didn't you ask your students at some point to, like, check their screen times or am I conflating stories?

Yeah, I do. I don't think Chuck believes how high those numbers are, but it's a... I'm a little surprise, for sure. 12 and a half hours? I mean... 12 and a half hours, on average, and that's for every single American. That's from cell phones. That's from television.

That's from computers. That's from iPads. That's from audio, you know, radio. 12 and a half hours, yeah. It's pretty wild. My students, though, that's a fun game. I tell them, so I teach this big lecture. intro to media, basically.

And on the first day, we talked about how, you know, you learned biology and chemistry and whatever in high school and, you know, when's the last time you used it? And they're like, I don't know. I go, okay, did you ever talk about media? And they're like, well, no.

Okay, when's the last time you use media? And they're like, well, how? Like two seconds ago, because I was paying attention to my phone and not you. It's like, all right, everyone take out your phone and tell me what your average screen time is across the week. And there's always people that are eight, nine hours. I had one kid who had 16 average hours three semesters ago, and that was entirely from TikTok. He was like, I literally

can't stop watching TikTok. I love stories like this. Seven years ago, a guy named Ben Still was a musician. He had zero interest in running a food company. But he was annoyed that so much much imported meat was being deceptively marketed and labeled as domestic and decided to fix the problem. The result was a company called Good Ranchers. It's a completely honest, totally transparent meat company that deals directly with American farms and ranches and promises to deliver high-quality American-grown meat for a fair price. Today, that promise. And Ben's absolute determination to keep it has not only propelled Good Ranchers into the top tier of meat delivery companies,

it's fueled enormous awareness among meteors like me, that we have all been affirmatively deceived by policies that allow imported me to be marketed as domestic. That's the reason I switch to good ranchers. If I'm being honest, though, I doubt that I would have stayed this long had the quality not been so exceptional. Every single cut I've devoured from good ranchers

has been straight up delicious and every morsel was raised on a small American farm or ranch. Give them a try. Subscriptions are affordable and flexible. In fact, if you start your plan today, you'll get free meat for life and $40 off your first order. Just use code mic at good ranchers.com. Free meat for life, 40 bucks off your first order. Good Ranchers.com. American meat delivered. If you could eat a steer, if you could eat a cow, don't take a chance on a foreign ranch. Get good ranchers. Now. Hey-ha. Well, look, the reason you and I are getting to know each other is because Dave Ramsey heard a podcast that I did months back with a guy named Nick Eberstadt, who writes not just about

seven million men sitting able-bodied men, not working and not looking for work, but he writes about what they're doing instead of looking for work. And I didn't believe it either, but he's like, look, the data's pretty clear. It says definitively that on average, they're spending over 2,000 hours a year on the phone, on a screen. This is a real thing with real repercussions in real time. Yeah. Again, the phone is a tool. It would be one thing if those guys were all reading War and Peace, making donations to UNICEF, calling their mom to say.

say hello, but the reality is, is that most of the time goes to not great use. It's kind of wasted time. You know, it's funny. I've said the same thing in a less elegant way, but the phone truly is a tool, and it's analogous to the First Amendment and much the same way a gun, truly is a tool and very much analogous to the Second Amendment. And you had a 30 out six up there that you carried. And I imagine that it was with you most of the time when you were bored and when you weren't. But talk about the things you carried and the business of carrying and make people understand that you didn't just go up there for 33 days to sit around on the tundra, you know, memorizing ingredient labels. I mean, because things got real sporty,

real quick. And this thing really did turn into a masagi. Yeah. So we, uh, what's interesting is, you know, Donnie is a hunter, and he's going up there to hunt, and I'd never hunted before. My position was effectively, I'm totally fine with anyone hunting. I don't know if I want to do it myself. I eat meat all the time. Don't know if I need to kill it. And so he calls me, and he goes, I think you should hunt. I go, I don't know. I'm a journalist. I'll stay out of it. He goes, no, I think you'd understand why we go up there if you were to hunt. And long story short is that, you know, I tell them maybe, but I buy a tag to hunt a caribou. I carry the rifle the whole time. Still going, maybe.

And we end up getting in a position where there was a herd that we'd predicted would cross this knoll and we're on the other side of this knoll, just kind of waiting. And they're coming over the knoll and I'm like, I don't have to do this. But there's this one caribou that is limping and he's clear. very old. He doesn't have much time left. And so I hunted. And my initial reaction was, oh, man, what have you done?

Like, it was regretful immediately. You shot it once or twice? Twice. Yeah. But once we started breaking it down, that really shifted how I saw things. Because I'm looking at it going, oh, it's meat. And then you're like, dude, you eat meat. meat every single day and you haven't given one ounce of thought or any emotion to that meat.

And now you're here kind of, you know, you're losing it. Like, you're an emotional mess. And there was nothing wrong with that. But what it did, it gave me a really deep appreciation for everything we have, you know, for that animal, the land and everything we have. But to your point about caring. One other thing, Mike, you didn't get off the plane, you didn't read ingredient labels, and then you didn't walk over and shoot a caribou. You're like weeks into the process, weeks into the adventure. I'm wondering, you spend a lot of time glassing.

Yes. Right? You're looking through binoculars. You're looking for the herd. And sometimes you see them. They certainly see you first. They run. I mean, you spend so much time not shooting.

So much time. Yes. Truly looking. And so during that period of time, you're cold, you're wet, you're eating what those horrible, what do they call them, mountain harvest? Mountain house, mountain house. So it's like meals ready to eat and cliff bars.

And you're losing weight. So how is your mind sort of keeping up with the reality of all this boredom, all this discomfort and all of this looking but not finding? You're just kind of hanging in. I mean, you're in it. And what's interesting is that although we had very stressful periods up there, you know, where things would go wrong, things became really sketchy, really fast. I would say as a whole, I was probably the calmest and most collected. I've been in my life where you're just like, oh, man, I love the world and everything in it.

You know, you kind of feel like the Zen monk who just came out of the cave after four years or something. But it was also tough. you know and I think part of it was that stimulation of having to really work your body every day work your mind every day be in the moment you're in it you're not thinking about anything else you are there you are 100% there you're making decisions that are consequential all the time and there's something about that sort of forced awareness that can almost be even though it is mildly stressful it's also very life-giving and you look at the reports of and I'm not trying to at all compare what I did up there to war or anything, but I do think that when you look at, you know,

reports of soldiers who have come back from war and then they have trouble adapting back to society, they do report, well, I was there with people on this very specific task, and I had to be 100% focused, and there's stress all the time, and I was very dedicated to this one cause with these people. And then I got pulled back into something that was totally different, and that's kind of a trip for me, you know? Well, I think the corollary that's totally legitimate is the old axiom

combat is long stretches of unthinkable boredom punctuated by moments of indescribable terror. And so maybe terror is not the right word, but to be on a hunt and really see nothing for two

weeks and to get increasingly hungry and to realize that maybe we just don't get one, Maybe we spend 33 days eating cliff bars if they last long enough, which can't be good for you. And now you come face to face with the herd. And now you take the rifle, which is pretty amazing. So Donnie must be hungry at this point, too. William must be hungry.

But they're going to let you take the shot? Yeah. God bless them. They did. And I will tell you, that meal is definitely the best meal I've ever had in my life when we got back to camp. food tastes good in context. One, hunger is the best sauce. But two, we know that things that we work harder for, we value those more internally at a deep level.

And there's years of research backing this up. And so it was one of those where you just feel like satisfied. Like, wow, this was an epic struggle to get this. Now we got it. I love the moment in the book where after all this adversity and after all this intensity, after carrying back 100 pounds on each man, at least it seemed like, you just finally get this moment of Zen. You get this moment of we're actually going to eat this thing.

It's all starting to come together. And then somebody pulls out of their pack. It's like seasoning. Somebody actually brought seasoning just to make it just a little, you know. It's like that just made me laugh out loud. Oh, yeah. That was Johnny. He knows. It was fantastic. I mean, it was really, it really was like one of those moments I'm going to remember forever. I still think that's the best meal I've ever had in my life, oddly enough.

I think it's worth a minute, too, to talk about what you're willing to shoot and what you're not when you're hunting at that level. I think a lot of people probably just imagine you go two weeks. You're out there to get something. You're hungry. You see the herd. Shoot the first one you see. But that's not even close. to the calculus that goes on. Yeah. So we're trying to basically shoot the oldest animals we can. And, you know, Donnie has kind of thought really deeply about questions like this. You know, if it's a million years ago, yeah, we're taking whatever we can because, like, we absolutely need the food. We don't have cliff bars in the bag. But in the context of today, when you think about, okay, trying to reduce suffering, trying to allow an animal to have as much time as possible before it goes.

we're looking for animals that are old. And you can age the caribou based on what their antlers look like. So caribou's antlers will grow and grow and grow and grow and grow and get more complex over time. But as they age, they can't maintain the size, but they maintain the complexity. So you'll see these slightly shorter antlers that are really, really complex. And that basically tells you it's at least eight, nine, ten years old. and their lifespan is at max, maybe 11, 12 years. The other thing that I want to spend a minute on

is just something that's bothered me for as long as I've worked for the Discovery Channel and every nature program I've ever had the privilege to narrate, is just this, call it the Disney-ified version of nature that people have in their heads and our tendency to anthropomorphize so many things. This is nature tooth and claw and the elk that you took,

or sorry, the caribou, what happens to an old animal in a herd if just left to nature, typically? Yeah, so that caribou, he would have died probably, as they're going to their summering grounds, they're going to have to do some river crossings. He probably was too old and weak to make it, so he drowns.

Another likely scenario would be that he gets picked off by a pack of wolves and eaten alive. Or his teeth get so broken up that he can't, he can no longer eat the food he needs to eat. So he sort of slowly starves to death despite trying to eat. I mean, to your point, nature is very brutal. And I do think we like to think it's all, you know, flowers and rainbows and kumbaya out there. but just as humans go to war, animals too. It really is an animal-eat animal world out there, and that's not always pretty.

So as a hunter, even though it is sort of like, you know, maybe there's questions of, are we playing God here? But to me, it's like, well, if I'm that caribou with a limp, I'll take the 30 out-6 bullet to the heart and be done in five seconds rather than, oh, the wolves are coming in. Yeah, it's so easy, too, just to kind of gloss over eaten alive by wolves. Let's just go ahead and ruminate for a minute. Millions and millions, countless animals,

have been eaten alive over a period of 20 minutes or a half hour. I've seen it. And I kind of wish other people saw it too in the same way that I wish people, in general, had a much better understanding of where their food comes from. A big point in your book, Mike, is that hunting is a way to do that. And I agree, it is for sure. But so too is a field trip to the slaughterhouse. Yeah.

A couple of hours on the kill floor. And, you know, I broke some eggs on dirty jobs, taking cameras into those places. Because I think you and I share that same sort of notion that we owe it to the animal to meet them. to see them. And it's telling the amount of pushback that comes when we do that. And I think it goes to another kind of discomfort that you write about. We'd rather have our head in the sand when it comes from truly looking at the thing we're about to eat. And toward that end, most of the meat that most people eat doesn't even look like the animal that once owned it. It's all just cut up and wrapped up and stacked up. A fish still looks like a fish, but a sirloin, you know, there's no reason to

look at that and assume that it came from a specific creature. It's completely disconnected from it. Anyway, your book does it through hunting, but I think there are a lot of other ways to do it as well, and I wonder if it's informed your writing since then. You make a great point about the slaughterhouse idea of whether it's field trips there. I mean, I do think that there's a lot of value and utility and teaching that can be done from, even if it's, you know, taking kids to a slaughterhouse to understand how this whole thing works and where does this food come from that you eat every day. It absolutely changed me.

I'll tell you, I have not wasted an ounce of meat since I got back from Alaska. Just like, never again am I ever going to do that. And I probably eat less of it, which is counterintuitive. A person begins hunting and they eat less meat? How does that work? Oh, it works because you know where it came from and what goes into it. Absolutely. Yeah, I shot a cow once on Dirty Jobs.

Chuck knows the story, but it's the, I'm not a hunter. The cow shot first. It was legit. It was a good kill. He had it coming. I mean, I think you would probably really appreciate this episode. It was a story of a mobile butcher in Western Michigan, and he would come to small farms where families would raise the beef they were going to eat for the next year or so.

And of course they have children and kids and they're not hardcore farmers, and they form attachments to these animals. They don't want to kill it, but they are going to eat it. And so it's a really beautiful is probably the wrong word, but it's a very authentic moment to be standing there with the family and just the level of appreciation and gratitude and understanding. that over the course of 10 minutes, this cow is going to be skinned, quartered, and over the course of a few hours, returned to the family in the form of 600 pounds of steaks, you know.

And to show people what that looks like, that's a very affirmative decision. And I think we probably offended as many people as we sort of entertained or inspired. But you have to do it, it seems. otherwise we just go on in our little comfort zone, not much thinking about what we're jamming down our well-muscled throats. Yeah, I'm going to have to watch that episode. That sounds really interesting and important. And I think, you know, Donnie speaks really well about this.

He has a movie, a short documentary that he put on YouTube. I think he actually made it because a production company was interested in doing a show with them, but they couldn't get past the hunting part, even though he's talking about it in a way that's so eloquent and smart. they couldn't get past that part. And he really talks about it as, if you eat meat today as an average person, your barrier to entry is swiping your credit card.

There's nothing wrong with that, but you don't know where the animal came from. You don't know anything about it. You don't know the life it lived. There's so many things that you don't know. And Donnie kind of puts it, well, I know. His barrier to entry is very high. And so, again, I don't think there's anything wrong

with eating factory meat or whatever. I think probably that industry could be improved in a lot of ways, but, and I'm not saying everyone should be a hunter, but I do think, maybe thinking about it could do us all a little bit of good. Why is your hat to say 2%? Oh, 2% of people, this is from a study, 2% of people take the stairs when there's also an escalator available. So my goal in life is to compel people and help people take the literal and metaphorical stairs.

Because when we try to improve our health, we often do these massive heroics, but it is literally just everyday small habits. Like, am I going to take the stairs every single time? Am I going to do the slightly more uncomfortable thing that's going to reward me in the long term? That really changes people in a sustainable way. So that seems somewhat at odds with Masogi. Is it baby steps toward doing the big hard thing with a 50% chance of failure where you hope not to die? Yeah.

You just don't go from, hey, I'm one of the batteries in the matrix to that. Maybe you take the stairs first. Maybe you take a cold shower. Yeah. Maybe do some other things. Yeah. I kind of think of Masogi is like the once a year sort of cleanse, right?

We're going to go do something really hard once a year. But if I'm doing Misogis every weekend, I'm going to get burnout or I'm going to break rule two. You know, so I'm thinking about how do I just make my world a little bit more uncomfortable, find ways to kind of embrace discomfort that are small. so I can change over time and all of a sudden find myself a little more resilient and all of a sudden what used to be uncomfortable

isn't so uncomfortable and along the way I've became a better human. So people understand it. Half of the book is the story of your adventure in the Arctic with William and Donnie.

It's a narrative. It's got a beginning and a middle and an end and a great through line. But every chapter is interrupted in a way with evidence that you later uncovered that seems to bolster the overarching claim, which is there's a benefit to every uncomfortable thing that happened to me.

So, you know, I think it's really important for people to understand, especially in areas of nutrition and fitness, how this trip changed you and how it could easily change anybody who reads the book. So my background is a health and science journalist, so I spend a lot of time reading studies and talking to the people in the labs. But I also don't think that, at least for me personally, I don't think that I can fully learn or understand something if I'm just behind the screen and on the phone all day talking to experts. I kind of need to go out in the world and experience it to get a better grasp on what it means. I'm like, how do I use this in my life as an average person? And so that's what I did with the book.

It's a sort of mix of behind the screens, having the big conversation and visiting. the people with the massive brains, but also, all right, I'm going to go up to Alaska and test this theory out. Is his name Cashy? Am I getting that right? Trevor Cashy. I've interviewed a lot of smart people in my life, just giving my line of work. And he tops them all. He's a brilliant, brilliant human being, also a very caring human being. Also a giant human being. He's like 6'4, 250, just...

Yeah, so this guy, this is the guy, Chuck, I was telling you about who graduates when it was like Harvard or something at 17 years of age, goes on to study and study. And now he's advising people on how to lose weight. And I know, you know, we've had some guests on here, Michael, who a keto approach, this approach, that approach. This guy, if I remember it right, is basically saying, look, I don't care what kind of diet you're on. I'm not even all that interested really in what you're eating. I'm interested in why you're eating and I'm super interested in how much you're eating because it's true, I suppose,

according to the data that most people just wildly over or underestimate the amount of calories they're taking in every day. Yeah, so people eat way more food than they realize. And this is shown in every study they've ever done on this. Now, the heavier you are, the worst your estimation of how much you're eating. So people who are obese tend to,

be off by about 800 calories a day. People who are at a BMI if we're using that, that are normal BMI, they're usually off by about 300. So one of his first steps is just building awareness into a system because he doesn't feel like it's entirely useful to be like, okay, you're eating this one way of life that's worked for you. We're going to give you something radically different that's just way, like you don't even know what you're doing yet. So he says, all right, why don't you figure out how much you're eating of what you're already eating. And then from there, we're going to go, okay, now we have some awareness. Along the way, people go, take me, for example.

I went through a system. I thought I was eating a serving of peanut butter, which is like 200 calories. When I actually measured it, it's like three servings. It's like 600 calories. I mean, that's the equivalent almost of a big Mac, right? And you're like... It's a big Mac and some fries. Yeah.

And then you go, oh, okay, well, yeah, no wonder I'm like a little bit heavier than I want to be. So like, what is a serving? Wow, we just corrected 400 calories from my daily diet in like 10 seconds just by being like, hey, dude, serving a peanut butter is like this, not this, you know? Right. Yeah, and you were like putting it on an apple, right? Like a protein shake, an apple, and one serving a peanut butter. You're like, why can't I get down to my target weight? And it's like, yeah, because you're off by 600 calories every single day. Yeah. So a lot of his is he doesn't care what you eat. He wants to help you figure out how much you're eating, and then he wants to help you figure out why you're eating because a lot of people today use food as a tool for

something else. So 80% of eating is driven by reasons other than true hunger. That could be because it's a certain time, but a lot of times people stress eat or they emotionally eat, right? Food can be a widget because it's sort of everywhere and it's hyper-palatable and easy to eat. So he starts to unpeel those layers too. And he's sort of been for a lot of people like the last stop on the line before surgery or extreme measures. And he's helped a lot of people. I've gotten unbelievable amount of messages from people who have read the book and go, hey, I went through this guy's Kickstarter program. I didn't just lose weight. I cleaned up like a lot of different habits because he's using a behavioral approach. I mean, he's read basically everything ever that B.F. Skinner has ever written.

and he just understands human behavior at such a deeply fundamental level that it's pretty wild. The federal government is not going to close America's skills gap. They have an important role to play for sure, but if we're serious about reinvigorating the skilled trades on a national level, we need more organizations like Skills USA making a real difference on a local level. These guys have been around since 1965, and today they are relevant. like never before, with hundreds of chapters in schools all over the country and hundreds of thousands of students participating and competing every year. Nobody is doing more to train the next generation of skilled workers than Skills USA. And I'm encouraging you to at least consider being a part of this

movement. Skills USA advisors and volunteers aren't just teaching trades. They're launching careers and strengthening the backbone of our country by mentoring the next generation of industry leaders. In high school, you could be among the people who are making this movement explode. Join the skilled trades movement. Support career and technical education programs through Skills USA.

There's no better way to do it. You can volunteer at a local chapter. You can start a chapter in your own town. Or you can just go to their website and see the impact for yourself and see, too, how easy it is. to get involved. Thousands of kids are being introduced to the trades in a way that's absolutely positively moving the needle. The goal is a million members by 2030. I think it's doable. I'm doing

what I can to help them. Learn more at skillsusa.org slash mic. That's skillsusa.org slash Mike. I'm talking skills, U.S. Skills, U.S. Skills USA. USA. I'm not sure if there's a difference between a diet and a fad diet. But is it fair to say that this kind of approach that's just rooted in, you say measuring, but it's really weighing, right? Like you literally weigh the serving, understand, like in a real, no kidding, measurable way, how much you're taking in.

It's just so interesting that something so fundamental is so typically ignored. Yeah. And I don't think that he would say you have to weigh your food forever. but for two, three weeks, like I experienced with the peanut butter, you know, he's fundamentally a scientist. It's like, how does a scientist learn anything at all? You have to measure it. Okay, well, how are we going to measure it? Are we going to measure it by eyeballing it? Well, that doesn't work because I did that with my peanut butter. We've got to be more precise here. So we're going to use a scale. Okay. Wow, a peanut butter serving is that small?

All right. I've learned something. It's crap. Bad news. But What about then with regard to weight loss and comfort? How should people think about hunger? I mean, I think it's telling what you said before that only 20% of the time for physiological reasons is that feeling legit. Why is our body lying to us? Why is it sending that signal? And the language, too.

I haven't eaten in four hours, but I'm using words like, I'm starving. I'm famished. No, no, I'm not. It's just been a while since I chewed and swallowed something. So here's the thing is bodies have been doing that for two and a half million years, and they weren't lying until about 100 years ago. Right? Right. Processed food.

So we're fighting against basically a million years of evolution that have programmed us to eat more rather than less, to be fatter rather than thinner. And so I think, first of all, it's realizing you're not a bad person. There's nothing wrong if you've put on weight. that was like the ultimate life hack for two and a half million years to not die. But we're no longer in those environments. So we have to do some things that are actually quite unnatural in the grand scheme of time and space. And that's learned to be okay with hunger.

And I think that people, and there's good evolutionary reasons for this, when they get hungry, they sort of freak out. They think it's going to build and build and then all of a sudden their stomach is going to implode and it's just going to be this grisly scene, doesn't actually work like that. Hunger comes and goes in waves, and it's oftentimes driven by thoughts and emotions and all these different complicated things. Now, of course, if you don't eat for a day or two days,

like, that's going to be some pretty genuine hunger. But the idea that we need to never feel the discomfort of hunger, that's not going to put us in a good place in the long haul. And I think the link to exercise is really important too. You kind of glossed over it earlier, but most people I think know intuitively a healthy lifestyle has components of exercise in it. But you said that exercise in and of itself is the single best way to fight virtually any malady, any disease, any ailment at all. And I just want to belabor the point because we're just coming out of three years of super sedentariness. And people are just so, say something inspirational that's going to make people either walk more or carry stuff or start rucking or something for God's sakes.

Our ancestors exercise about 14 times more than we did every single day, more than we do. we evolved to move around to run down meat in the form of an animal and carry that meat home after we'd hunted it. We would walk the land, searching for things to eat and bring it back. I mean, we were just constantly moving. And our bodies are adapted to about that level of exercise. Once we go too far below that, not 14 times, but once we don't move enough, we start to get sick. So I tend to think of, it's not that to me, exercise is. isn't medicine so much as inactivity is poison.

And people start to get pretty sick when they're not active enough. And the great thing is, and this is what I'll say for the people who fused with their couches during COVID, is that the least you exercise now, the more benefit you'll get. So the people who exercise, like, at the absolute bottom, they get the most benefit by doing like anything at all. They experience massive jumps. again, it is the best thing you can do to prevent disease, full stop. For the book, I met with researchers and doctors at the Mayo Clinic,

and their whole deal is like, we just tell our patients they need to exercise more because then chances are we're not going to see them. We can prevent a lot of things that way. I have a friend who's a pretty famous doctor, a longevity guy, Peter Attia, and for years, you know, he was really into all these different things for longevity. in the past three, four years he's come around and this goes, yeah, actually, it's all just exercise. Like, you just need to exercise more. That's the number one thing that you can do to live longer. More importantly, to live better.

Yeah. Because who cares if you live to 100 if you don't enjoy it? I mean, people get enjoyment about over being able to go out in the world and do things. Do interesting things. The moment people lose their mobility and ability to move around, they get pretty sad, pretty quick. And things go downhill. How uncomfortable, and this is, I guess, I don't know, a scale of one to ten or just however you want to answer it, but I mean, you talk about comfort as it impacts virtually everything, from fitness to nutrition, to boredom, to all of that stuff. But the biggie is death, right?

how uncomfortable are we as a people or maybe as a society with death? And what do you think we ought to do, if anything, to get more comfortable with the inevitable? As part of the book, I talked to this historian whose name is Gary Laterman. I think he's at Emory University. And he talked about how in America up until about 18, the 1860s, death was part of our lives. When someone would die, we would have to take care of the body. We would have to do everything around that. We were often treating people ourselves.

So it was this very intimate fact of life. We would have to slaughter our own animals, that sort of thing. But then after about around the time of the Civil War, death started being taken off our hands. So the funeral industry rose and embalming became very popular. Lincoln was the first. Lincoln, right. a popular embalming and that sort of set the trend off. And at the same time the modern medical system rose. So now people sort of go into a hospital. If they die there, they immediately sort of go

into the funeral system. They get prepared to look as alive as possible for sort of last final viewing. And then we sort of bury them. And then the saying is always, you know, take your mind off it. Don't think about it. So we've sort of engineered it out of our lives, which is, natural because the fact that we're all going to die is like the most uncomfortable thing ever. I mean, it's the most uncomfortable thing you can think about. But there's a lot of science that suggests that thinking about death, becoming aware of that, it improves your life because it changes your behavior in such a way that you start to do things that enhance your happiness, that lead to better relationships. And as part of the book, I traveled to Bhutan to study this.

Bhutan is a very interesting case study because I think there are one. 60 out of 180 on the GDP rankings. Very poor country, but they're in Nepal, right? They're right by Nepal. They don't have a single stoplight in the country. There's not, you know, McDonald's, Burger King, that sort of stuff. But when researchers do these extensive happiness surveys, they rank in the top 20 happiest countries on Earth, which is like, you're punching above your weight.

Yeah. And there's a lot of reasons for that. One of them, for example, is they don't. don't really carry death. Another is that they spend a lot of time in nature. Sorry to I say, they don't carry debt. Debt. Yeah. They spend a lot of time in nature. But the other is that they're instructed to think about their death every single day. There's reminders of death all over the country. So when people die, their ashes get mixed with clay into these little things called saw-saws, and they're about this big. They're these little pyramids. And these things are

everywhere, like all over the country. It's this constant reminder, hey, this ride is going to end for you. And, uh, it's like urns? You mean like, so the ashes of people are on public display all over the place? Yeah, they're mixed with clay, these little pyramids. And they're just everywhere. So I spoke with a few different people there about this phenomenon.

But one of them is this guy who's a Kempo, which is a high up ranking in Buddhism, kind of like a cardinal. He put it to me this way. He goes, I want you to pretend that you. are walking along the trail. And in 500 yards, there's a cliff. Now, the cliff is death. Don't you want to know that there's a cliff in 500 yards?

Because once you know there's a cliff in 500 yards, you're going to walk the trail differently. You might stop and smell the flowers on the trail. You might take in the nature. You might have different conversations with the people you're walking the trail with. So what happens when you remind yourself that you are eventually going to die

is it changes your behavior. Forces you to walk the trail differently. And that can lead to better decisions that enhance your life. So as we start to land the plane here, I want to be respectful of your time, but I've got this thing called a sweat pledge and we award work ethic scholarships

and it's not quite a masagi, but it's a version of it. And by the way, it's a very relative thing. 50% chance of, failure if you're 16 years old going for your Eagle Scout Award. It's very different than moving an 85-pound boulder underwater for several miles, right? But to be affirmatively attempting to challenge people, you know, that to me is sort of the basis of at least trying to have a conversation about work ethic. And the most important tenant, or at least the first one on this

sweat pledge is essentially a demand to be grateful or at least acknowledge the fact you've already won the greatest lottery of all time. You walk the earth. You live in a pretty great country. You got good cards, right? And so above all else, I'm grateful. I'm looking for people who agree with that. And I'm shocked, Michael, at how many people are offended by that challenge, like right out of the gate. And I just, I wonder about your thoughts on gratitude and how it impacts this whole weird journey down comfort highway. Well, I can tell you that after I came back from my time in the Arctic, I was so unbelievably grateful for things that I hadn't thought about my entire life.

Like running water, hot running water, hot running water is unbelievable. But like, when do you think about it? the fact that to go to the bathroom, I don't have to walk out on the tundra with a rifle because there's grizzlies. Like, this toxic stuff that comes out of my body just shoots down into the ground somewhere. Yeah.

This is like a common thing, right? It's not like, I'm the king and I'm the guy with the toilet, like everyone has toilets in the U.S. Mm-hmm. A thing I talk about in the book is this concept called prevalence-induced concept change. And it was discovered by these two harvents, psychologist and it basically says that humans,

when we experience fewer problems, we don't actually realize it. We just look for the next problem. This was a hack in our mind during evolution that allowed us to remain vigilant and constantly stand on guard looking for problems so we'd survive. But it's carried over into our modern world.

And so as the world has gotten better and better and better, we don't stop and go, wow, things are amazing. We just look for the next problem. So if you ask someone today, do you think that the world is better? Only 12% of Americans think the world is better and improving. That's because we're constantly moving the goalpost. We don't have the ability to go, well, you know, 600 years ago, I probably would have been a surf under some king who had to work 16 hours threshing grain, and I would have eaten only bread and, you know, died at 28. We go, well, that one thing annoys me,

so no, the world wasn't getting better. And so I think that we're just really bad at taking these grand perspectives because I'm not saying that America is perfect at all, but if you look at how we've progressed over time and the way that we live now, we are living in the best time of all time. even some of our least fortunate people are living far better lives than kings would have lived

700 years ago. And I think it's important not to forget that. Well, look, that's why I recommend your book unreservedly because I think there's a, like the sign says at Disneyland, you know, you must be this tall to get on the ride. And it's another way of saying, you know, are you equipped to handle the trip. And I've become convinced in every measurable and meaningful way

that your affirmative willingness to do the hard thing is going to be the proximate cause of virtually every good thing that happens for you. And so I just, I think it's a great paradox because I agree completely. There has never been a better time to be alive than right now. And yet, you look at the obesity rate, in this country, something's wrong.

You look at the exercise rate, something's wrong. You look at the workforce participation rate. Something's wrong. We've entered into maybe, I think Chuck and I were kicking this idea around earlier. Things are so good today that we can actually be consumed with conversations, and I say this with respect, about pronouns. We can be consumed with conversations that would have never in a million years occurred to us a million years ago or even a hundred years ago because we just simply couldn't afford to be that comfortable.

So, yeah, it's a great time to be alive, but fundamentally, I think your book is a cautionary tale of what happens when people don't. engage in their own version of some kind of Masagi. Yeah. I'm with you. What's the next one? The next one is called scarcity brain. The basic premise is everyone knows that moderation in all things is true. Well, why can't we moderate? So it investigates that.

Why are we always driven to more, more consumption, and how can we sort of find enough? So it's, yeah, it's been a fun project. What is your next crucible? your next vision quest, because I think I'm saying Masogi wrong, aren't I? You just got it. Yeah. You just got it with Masogi.

Mosogi? I think I need to do something in the water. I don't love water. I live in the desert for a reason. So I've got to find some water task with maybe I'll call Marcus up from the book and see if he's got some wacky thing in store for me. I got a buddy. His name's Jeremiah Sullivan.

He invented the first stainless steel shark suit. and I made one with him back in 2006, and we tested it for the first time on the ocean floor off the coast of the Bahamas. We were down in the Bahamas, and we each got bitten by a few dozen big reef sharks. It was exciting. I don't know if it was a Musogi, but I think you'd probably have a good time, you know,

peeing in stainless steel and probably give you something to write about somewhere down the line. That's amazing. Did you get footage? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. All right. Now I've got to watch that episode too. No, look, when you see the Dirty Jobs guy upside down being shook like a tug toy running out of air 60 feet down.

Driven into the bottom of the ocean. Just pile driving, voiding my bladder, and making a really high-pitched womanly sound on international television. It's, um, it ain't comfortable, my friend. Yeah. Well, I will say I can't wait to see it. All right, man, you've been generous with your time. I appreciate the last minute accommodation. The book is the comfort crisis.

Can't recommend it enough. Go get it wherever you read books. And take a cold shower. Be a 2% or take the stairs for crying out loud. Yes. Especially if you're waiting for the elevator at the gym. Just a bad look. Thanks, brother.

Thanks for having me. And I just want to say you want to go to EasterMichael.com to find the book. Learn more. Easter Michael. Easter Michael. So like Michael Easter was taken, you had to go your last name first? I just had this conversation with Chuck. I tried to buy that URL when I was 16 years old.

And some dude took it and parked it for the last two decades. When we were 16, URL was an entirely different thing. Yeah. It's so funny because for years there was a fireman over in Oakland named Mike Rowe who had locked up my name. Like after the first year of Dirty Jobs. Yeah. He wouldn't sell it. then one year he just forgot to renew it. So, you know, I just waited around long enough.

But look, Easter Michael is perfect, all things considered. It's not the most comfortable URL, but it's the one you got. It'll do. All right, you guys. Thanks, everybody. Talk to you next week. Thank you. This episode is over now. I hope it was worthwhile. Sorry it went on so long, But if it made you smile, then share your satisfaction in the way that people do. Take some time to go on a lot of... I hate to ask, I hate to beg, I hate to be a nudge. But in this world, the advertisers really like to judge.

You don't need to write a bunch, just a line or two. All you've got to do is leave a call. quick five-star review. Not four. All you've got to do is leave a quick five-star review. And not three. All you've got to do is leave a quick five-star review. Definitely not too.

All you got to do is leave a quick five-star review. We need five. All you got to do is leave a quick... Even if you hate it. Five-star... Especially if you hear it. ...d thank you.